


Seige Etiquette

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 05:53:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15430410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A one-shot where Rey, the reigning queen bee of a high school in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere suburbia gets trapped in a bathroom with reigning-over-nothing Ben Solo. (A complete teen trope but a fun one, at that!)





	Seige Etiquette

Rey is getting another beer in the kitchen and watching two badly dressed sophomores try not to be too obvious about the fact that they’re staring at her, when the cops show up outside Connix’s house.

“Uh-oh,” Finn says when he spies them. She follow his gaze through the living room window where, sure enough, two cruisers are gliding to the curb with their lights flashing, silent as sharks. “Friends are here.” Right away he heads down the stairs to the basement, motioning for her to follow without actually waiting to see if she does. Boyfriend or not, she guesses she can’t really blame him. After all, it’s not like she gets in trouble anymore.

“Everybody down,” Rose calls from the hallway, flicking the kitchen lights off so Rey is plunged into darkness, save the glow of the water dispenser on the front of the stainless-steel fridge. Rose’s parents are both law professors an hour away from here at Cornell, and firm believers in the importance of exercising one’s constitutional rights: Never, never open up the door to the police unless they have a warrant, Rey’s heard them say over a number of bagel breakfasts at Rose’s kitchen table, same as other parents would remind you to make sure to be home by curfew. 

“Somebody get the rest of the lights!”

“Are you serious?” a panicky-looking freshman asks as everyone dashes for cover—into bedrooms and under coffee tables, inside the immaculately organized pantry. “You’re not going to let them in?”

“Do you want to go to jail?” Rose snaps, which seems a little dramatic. “Turn off the music. They’ll be gone in a minute.”

Rey’s not entirely sure about that, actually, but before she can register her concerns, the bell is ringing; the police are knocking hard and insistent on the front door, glowing flashlights visible through the frosted glass. The combination of noise and sound sets something off in her, a cold animal panic. Suddenly it feels very important to hide. She scurries up the short flight of stairs off the foyer and through the closest door, shutting it firmly behind her before turning around and realizing that a) it’s the bathroom, and b) Ben Solo is sitting on the edge of the tub in the dark.

“Hi,” he says.

“Um,” she says. Fuck. “Hi.”

“Sorry,” Ben says, standing up and wiping his hands on his jeans. “I can get out of here, if you have to—I mean, everybody was just yelling to hide and stuff. I kind of panicked.”

“No, I don’t need to—” Rey exhales, heart pounding with a savage ferocity wholly disproportionate to the seriousness of this situation. That happens to her sometimes, now. The cops are still ringing the doorbell. “I mean, that’s why I’m in here, too.”

“Oh.” Ben nods, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Okay.”

They look at each other for a moment. She breathes. Ben has been in her class since kindergarten, but she’s never actually talked to him before. He only ever comes for half the year because of some arcane agricultural law that lets him be homeschooled for the fall semester so he can help his parents at their farm, thirty miles outside Ithaca, one of the last working family-owned operations in the entire state of New York. Every autumn she forgets about him and every January he shows up at school again, blinking and dazed, like he’s spent the last six months wandering dumbly through a cornfield. She’s never seen him at a party before in her life.

“I came with my friend,” he explains, like he can see her wondering, as if he thinks she’s going to ask to see his pass. She thinks he might be afraid of her. She’d probably be afraid of her, if she were Ben. “You know Poe? He’s dating Kaydel. So I came with him.”

She nods, not particularly caring. God, this whole night sucks. She’s about to make an excuse and get the hell out of here, but before she can come up with something plausible the beam of a flashlight shines directly through the bathroom window, and like an instinct she’s grabbing Ben’s arm and jerking roughly, pulling him back into the shadows beside the tub.

“Sorry,” she says once the light has moved away again. “Close call.”

“It’s okay.” Ben sits back down on the edge of the bathtub.

When they were little kids he was notorious for falling asleep at his desk every day during free read. His fingernails were always too long. She remembers not wanting to get stuck next to him in line or at lunchtime or in the Starlab, a traveling planetarium that came to school every year, all of them crawling into a big inflatable tent in the middle of the gym to look up at the constellations. “Don’t be giving that boy a hard time, Rey,” her mother scolded when she came home and complained about it. She was already popular back in elementary school, and her mom was worried it was going to turn her mean. “He’s got enough trouble without you piling on.” It occurs to Rey, all of a sudden, that she never actually asked her what that meant.

The police are still banging on the front door, insistent: “Kaydel Connix!” a man’s voice calls, authoritative. “I know your parents, Kaydel, and they’re gonna want you to open the door now.” Kaydel’s parents are in Harrisburg dealing with some kind of disciplinary clusterfuck at her brother’s boarding school. For a second she feels kind of bad for them.

“This happen a lot?” Ben asks.

She sits down on the lid of the toilet seat. “Sometimes,” she allows. “They’ll be gone in a minute.” She’s not at all as confident as she sounds. She’s waited out the police in this very house before, plus once at Rose’s, and another time, memorably, while fooling around in a coat closet with Finn at Jessika’s: normally the partiers lay low, the police get bored or tired or hungry, and eventually they go away. But this feels different. The last week of summer, two juniors drank a twelve-pack of Budweiser and killed almost a whole fucking family at the intersection down by the Walmart, and now it’s like the whole town thinks everybody else is breathtakingly stupid enough to do what they did. It occurs to her, as she listens to the incessant banging on the front door of the house, that the McCormack County Sheriff’s Department might be looking to make a point.

Well, she thinks, pulling her legs up on the toilet seat and wrapping her arms around her knees, let them make it, if that helps them.

Ben is glancing at her across the bathroom, seemingly unconcerned about the scrum of law enforcement out on the front lawn. It’s his first party, after all. She guesses it’s not like he’s got anything to compare it to. “Should have brought snacks,” he says, sliding off the lip of the bathtub and making himself comfortable on the tile floor, crossing his legs at the ankles, and before she can respond either way he grins. “You remember how Mrs. Hollander used to give out Atomic FireBalls during tests?”

That surprises her. Mrs. Hollander taught fourth grade. “Uh-huh.”

“I was obsessed with those things,” Ben says. “Every day I used to ask her if we could have them. Like, I used to get so excited for tests, just so I could cram a bunch of FireBalls into my mouth and chow down. And finally one day she kept me after the last bell, and I thought I was in trouble, but it turned out she’d been at the dollar store and gotten this giant tub of FireBalls just for me. She told me I was going to make myself sick, but of course I walked outside and ate like a hundred of them all at once. Burned all my taste buds off, and that wasn’t even the worst of it. Anyway, that was the end of me and FireBalls.” He shuts up abruptly then, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m rambling.”

“It’s okay,” she says. She kind of liked listening to him, actually. Nobody has talked to her about something as stupid as Atomic FireBalls in months. “I don’t mind.”

Just then her phone buzzes with a text from Rose: Where are you??? she wants to know, the question followed by a long row of screaming emojis.

Upstairs bathroom, she texts back.

Wtf are you doing up there? We’re all in the basement. Come down now.

She looks at the screen for a moment, then back at Ben. She doesn’t know if she’s ever actually bothered to look at him before, like in her head he was a walking, sentient wheat stalk. That’s not the impression she gets now at all. His clothes are clean, if a little bit trashy: light-wash jeans and a faded T-shirt with the Ghostbusters logo on it, plus a pair of knockoff Timberland boots. His eyes are bright and intelligent and sharp. He could do okay, she thinks, in a place like New York City or California, where the past doesn’t cling like the smell of dirty laundry. Unfortunately for him, this is a suburb of a suburb of Syracuse. People have long memories here.

She turns her phone over so the screen is facing down, tucking it underneath her on the toilet seat. “How’s your senior year going so far?” she asks him, then immediately feels like an idiot, remembering that he hasn’t even set foot in school yet this year. “I mean, such as it is.”

Ben’s mouth twists at that, not quite a smile. “Can’t complain, I guess.” He tilts his head to the side, looking up at her. “How’s yours?”

“Good,” she chirps like a reflex, which is of course a giant lie, and not even a good one, and she’s thinking that of course Ben knows that, until the moment that it suddenly occurs to her that he might not. After all, who can say what the hell news makes its way out to the Solo Family Farm during harvest season? It might as well be medieval times over there. The idea of him not knowing makes him oddly compelling to her, like here is the one person in all of New York State to whom she’s exactly the same as she used to be. She wants to keep up the facade. “I’m applying to schools, mostly. Are you—?” she starts, then breaks off, but there’s nowhere to go but forward. “Applying to schools?”

Ben smirks at that. “No, Rey,” he says quietly. “I am not applying to schools.”

Something about the way he says her name makes her stomach do a strange flip. She’s never heard him say it before. She looks down at her hands in her lap, at her manicure. She and Rose went to the nail place this afternoon. She’s been her best friend since ninth grade, which doesn’t mean she probably doesn’t talk about her when she gets up and leaves the room, just like everyone else does. It’s entirely possible she’s talking about her right now.

Ben reaches up and picks a fat candle off the side of the bathtub, probably pumpkin or cinnamon bun or something equally disgusting, and roots around in his pocket until he comes up with a book of matches. “There,” he says, lighting it and setting it back on the side of the tub.

“Is that a good idea?” she asks, motioning to the window.

“They can’t see it,” Ben says, and for some reason she believes him. He looks oddly handsome in the flicker of the candlelight, all sharp cheekbones and serious expression. Rose will die if she tells her that. She might not tell Rose anything about this at all.

“This is a really ugly bathroom,” she observes instead of thinking about it, looking around at the faux-Mexican tile and brightly painted sink, the sunken bathtub that looks like its sole purpose was orgies in the 1970s. Above the toilet is a framed stock photo of a baby wearing a shower cap and holding a rubber duck. “I never really stopped to notice it before.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ben says, peering around. “I could sit in here all day, personally. Have a bubble bath. Read a romance novel.”

She laughs at that, surprisingly. She didn’t expect Ben Solo to be funny, like maybe he’s from someplace where laughter is verboten, and then she realizes what a stupid thing that is to think. 

“Use a bath bomb,” she adds.

Ben shakes his head. “What’s a bath bomb?” he asks.

“It’s like a fizzy soap thing,” she tries to explain. “You put it in the tub and it kind of explodes and bubble bath and sometimes glitter comes out.”

Ben considers it. “That sounds like a gigantic mess,” he says.

“Sometimes,” she agrees.

They look at each other for a moment. Neither one of them says anything. She remembers, suddenly, a morning in the spring of third grade when he came into school with a hole in the collar of his T-shirt and a bruise the size of a new potato on his cheek. She remembers how afraid it made her—not for Ben but of him, like maybe black eyes were catching somehow. The memory makes her feel about two inches tall.

The police are still shouting Kaydel’s name, doorbell chiming. It reminds her, stupidly, of the Siege of Bastogne, which was part of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Lately when she can’t sleep, which is often, she’s been reading all the old history books from the shelves in her dad’s office, poring over maps and committing battle plans to memory. She still has circles under her eyes the color of overripe eggplants, but she thinks chances are good she’ll pass the AP U.S. History test at the end of the year.

Ben tilts his head toward the window, listening. “Doesn’t really sound like they’re giving up, huh?”

She smiles, though it isn’t actually funny. The Siege of Bastogne lasted for seven days. “Nope,” she agrees. For an instant she wonders what might happen if she strolled out onto Kaydel’s lawn right now, waved to the police in the porch light. Hey, guys. It’s me, your good buddy Rey. Let’s all call this off and go home.

Her butt is starting to fall asleep on the toilet seat, so she slides to the floor and sticks her legs out in front of her, her knees a few inches from Ben’s. He’s got his hands folded in his lap, like he’s praying; he’s got long fingers and round, knobby knuckles, the nails bitten way far down. She imagines them tending an animal or fixing some kind of complicated machinery, which immediately makes her feel like an idiot. God, she must be further gone than she thought.

Her phone chimes again then, insistent: Are you ok??????? Rose demands. She can picture them all down in the basement, draped over armchairs and sitting cross-legged on the carpet, stifling giggles in the arms of their hoodies. She used to wonder if Rose might have a crush on Finn, back when she used to care about things like that. She thinks she might resent Rey a little, especially lately, although she knows she would never admit it. Rey thinks she might resent herself, if she were her.

She switches the phone over to silent and tucks it back under her butt, but when she looks up again, Ben is watching her. “What are you doing up here?” he asks suddenly, in a voice like the thought has just occurred to him that possibly this might be a trick.

“What?” She doesn’t understand the question. “Same thing as you’re doing,” she says.

“Yeah, but, like, why are you up here with me and not downstairs?” His face has changed, gotten sharper somehow. “I mean, what are you after?”

“What?” she says again, stalling for time. She can’t tell him the truth, which is that she’s up here with him in this bathroom because she cannot bear to be down in the basement with people who know her; because she cannot bear to be anywhere at all. Telling him will break the spell, which is the whole point of being up here to begin with. “I’m not after anything.”  
He shakes his head. “People like you are always after something.”

“Seriously?” Her spine straightens up against the bathroom door. “People like me?”

Ben shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually.” Suddenly, she’s spoiling for a fight—craving it, even. Lately everyone is so fucking nice to her; there’s a certain dark pleasure in this sudden nastiness. It feels good. It feels normal. “And you don’t know anything about me.”

“I’m not stupid,” Ben insists, as if she’s called him stupid, which she has not. “If you’re up here with me instead of with them, there’s a reason why.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she snaps, drawing herself up against the door and thrusting her shoulders back, her anger like a fire burning deep inside her chest. In one of her father’s books about the Civil War she read that the only real advantage the North had was industry: that the round-the-clock shoveling of coal into giant roaring furnaces was the only reason the Union didn’t fall. She thinks of that sometimes now, when the alarm goes off in the morning and she feels like she can’t get out from under the covers: She imagines that she is a munitions factory. She imagines that she is a train. “What’s wrong with my friends, exactly?”

“What?” Ben looks stricken, like he thinks she’s about to go completely insane on him here in Kaydel Connix’s mother’s ugly bathroom. It’s possible he knows the truth about her after all. “No, I’m not saying anything’s wrong with your friends, I just—”

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with them when you were tracking your dirty boots all over their houses and drinking their beer,” she says snottily—and that’s good, she thinks with some nasty satisfaction. That’s exactly the kind of thing the old her would have said. “Back when you were doing that, they were all just fine.”

Ben’s eyes go hot and injured. “I didn’t drink anything of theirs,” he snaps. His whole body is suddenly made of angles, all shoulders and knees. “Me and Poe, we stopped and got beers on the way over here. We aren’t freeloading.”

He sounds so upset that she feels herself soften. “No, I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean—” But she did mean, a little bit, and both of them know it. She was picking a fight, using him as some kind of messed-up scratching post. Her mother would be appalled. “Sorry,” she says finally, leaning her head back against the door. All the energy has drained out of her at once. “That was bitchy.”

Ben doesn’t contradict her. “You don’t know anything about me, either,” he points out. “Do you think this is, like, my dream? Like I’ve spent my whole life just dying to be stuck in a bathroom at some lame party with you? Princess Rey Niima?”

That stings. Not the nickname—God knows she’s been called worse—but the idea that he’s doing her some kind of favor. She doesn’t want anybody’s pity. She never has. “A lot of people at school would die for exactly that chance, actually,” she retorts. “Which is more than I can say for you.”

Ben blows a breath out, shakes his head a little. “Wow,” he says, disbelieving. “You’re kind of exactly as horrible as everybody says you are, huh?”

“So then what the hell are you still doing in here with me?”

Ben shrugs. “That’s a good question, actually,” he says, and gets up. “See you, Rey.”

She remembers something else then, pulled from the depths of her brain like a slimy scrum of seaweed: seventh grade, piss in Ben’s gym sneakers in the locker room, all the boys hooting gleefully about it down the hall. She didn’t piss in them herself, certainly. But she didn’t help him, either. She’s been thinking that a lot lately, all the teeny tiny choices that can change her entire life. That boy’s got enough problems without you adding to them.

“Ben, stop,” she says, reaching out and grabbing his ankle before she can think better of it. It’s warm and surprisingly solid through his jeans. “Can you just wait for a second?”

“What are you—?” Ben shakes her free, but gently. “Why?”

Rey sighs loudly, and then she just says it. “Because I don’t want you to leave.”

Ben makes a face at that, openly skeptical, but he does what she tells him—sitting back down beside her, closer than he was before. He smells like soap and grass and leaves, nothing like she remembers from when she was a kid. “What,” he says, his voice low and flat.

She thinks for a moment. “What’s your favorite thing?” she asks him. “About working on the farm?”

Ben rolls his eyes. “Riding the tractor,” he deadpans immediately, which morphs into a southern accent. “Picking my teeth with hay, ma’am.”

“Can you stop?” she says, knowing she sounds cranky. “I’m asking you a sincere question. You’re right, I don’t know jack all about you. But I’m asking.”

Ben exhales loudly. “All right,” he says, leaning his head back against the door, the skin of his throat pale and exposed. “I like sleeping outside in the summer, I guess. My friend Poe, who I came here with? We camp out most nights, instead of staying indoors, and that’s what I like.” He shrugs. “Sorry if it’s not farm-specific enough for you.”

“That sounds nice,” she lies. Actually it sound terrifying, but to be fair, these days she’s not exactly a good gauge of what’s scary and what’s not. She imagines it, staring up at the sky with nobody else around, like if she weren’t careful she could fly right off the face of the earth and never be heard from again.

“So what about you?” Ben asks. He’s not mad at her anymore, or at least he’s decided not to act like he is. She feels disproportionately relieved. “What’s your favorite thing about being the queen bee?”

“I’m not the queen bee,” she says automatically, which is also a lie, and both of them know it. But part of the power is in never having to admit it out loud. She’s the most popular girl in their grade—or at least, she was before everything happened. Now she kind of doesn’t know what she is. A curiosity, maybe.

Ben snorts. “Okay.”

She shrugs. The truth is that her favorite thing about being popular is being able to control when and how people look at her and what they see when they do, like she’s the curator of a fancy museum and the only exhibit is herself. The problem is that lately she hasn’t been able to do it. She’s lost control of her own story, somehow, since everything happened. She can’t figure out how to get it back.

“I like having a lot of friends,” she tells him finally.

It’s a bullshit answer, but Ben doesn’t push. “Yeah,” he says, putting his hand down besides hers on the cool bathroom tile. “That sounds nice, too.”

They look at each other for a minute. She reminds herself that Finn is right downstairs. Rey and Finn have been dating on and off since last fall, and by all high school metrics he’s a decent-to-good boyfriend: Lord knows he got more than he bargained for when he asked her out that day by the fountain at the Clearview Mall. Still, every once in a while, while they’re talking she can see that he might as well be on planet Mars for everything he’s actually hearing. There is something about Ben Solo that makes her think he’d listen for real.

Then again, she thinks, even as her pinky inches closer to Ben’s on the tile, maybe he wouldn’t. She’s dimly aware that she’s making him up in her mind even as he’s sitting here, like she’s writing herself into a story. She’s dimly aware that Ben is making her up, too.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe, for as long as they’re in here, they can both be whoever they want.

She pulls her legs up underneath her, looks at him through her eyelashes in the dark. “It was your dream a little bit, though, right?” she asks him, smiling a little. “To be in here with me?”  
Ben laughs at that. “Are you serious right now?” he asks, but he’s blushing, and she knows she’s won. “You are something else, truly.”

She’s about to tell him he’s right—that she is something else, and that something can be his for one night only—when she hears a familiar voice trilling out across the driveway. “Finn!” she’s yelling. “Finn Trooper, are you in there?”

“Oh, Jesus.” She scrambles across the bathroom and peek out the window like a prairie dog, but she already knows what she’s going to see: It’s Finn’s mother, a big-haired woman who has hated Rey’s guts from the time she started dating her son and continues to hate them now, which gives Rey a grudging kind of respect for her. It takes a set of brass balls to be mean to someone like her. Squinting through the screen she can see a handful of faces she recognizes: Jessika’s parents, and Pammich’s; even Rose’s parents’ Volvo is parked down the street. “Shit,” she says, turning back to look at Ben. “Okay, this part has never happened before.”

“They called people’s parents?”

She shrugs. “Some people’s.”

Ben looks at her sharply. “Fuck,” he says, and she thinks she’s alarmed him in the moment before she realizes he’s talking about his own. Maybe she really is as selfish as he thinks she is. For the first time all night he looks sincerely afraid. “You don’t think—”

“No,” Rey tells him honestly. “I don’t think anybody would have thought to call yours.”

Ben looks reassured by that, though not entirely. “No,” he echoes. “I guess not.”

They’re quiet for another minute. She can’t stop staring out the window, even though she knows somebody’s going to see her. She guesses it doesn’t matter at this point. She guesses none of it really does.

Here is what will happen next: She’ll go home with Rose’s parents and sleep on the spare bed in Rose’s bedroom, just like she has been for the last two months. Because her parents aren’t out there waiting for her in the silver SUV she learned to drive on, angry at her for drinking and disrespecting authority but relieved, at the end of the night, that she’s safe. Her parents are in freshly dug graves at Woodlawn Cemetery six miles away from here, where they’ve been since two drunk juniors from your high school T-boned them on their way home from a dinner at TGI Fridays at the end of the summer. If they were still alive she’d like to think they would want her to go out and live her fucking life.

“Come here,” she says, holding her hand out for Ben in the darkness.

“Why?” he asks, getting uncertainly to his feet.

“Because,” she says, letting the nonanswer hang there. She has never been the aggressor in a situation like this in her entire life, and she finds she does not hate it.

Ben comes closer, cautious. He’s taller than she is by nearly a foot. She reaches up, putting her hand on the back of his warm, shorn head, and kisses him. She doesn’t hate that, either, it turns out.

He pulls back after a moment, blinking at her. “What was that for?”

“Keeping me company,” she says, which is sort of the truth.

“Okay,” Ben says, and smiles, kisses her again. He’s not a great kisser, unpracticed and a little spitty, but she actually doesn’t care about that at all: there are tiny explosions going off all over her body, like sparks flying up out of a campfire. Ben puts both hands on her face. She wants to stay like this forever even though she knows it’s impossible, that it’s just a weird stopover, like how during the Revolutionary War the two armies took breaks and had Christmas together, then went back to shooting each other with muskets after the roasts were gone. She isn’t sure where she got that fact, actually—she didn’t read it in any of her dad’s old books—and she doesn’t know if it’s true or just something someone made up to make the world seem less brutal. Here in this bathroom with Ben Solo, it feels like maybe it could possibly be real.

“I’m not breaking up with Finn,” she blurts finally, her face on fire, her whole body buzzing like a burned-out neon sign. It’s hot in this bathroom, even with the window open. “I can’t—I mean. I’m not breaking up with Finn.”

Ben laughs at that, a quiet baffled sound. “Jesus, Rey, did you hear me asking you to?” he says, but he bends down and kisses her again then, his hands finding hers by her sides, and she’s opening her mouth to tell him maybe he should ask her to, she’s actually about to say that, when she hears the cops coming through the front door downstairs.

“Everybody out,” a man’s voice is yelling; through the crack under the bathroom door she can see that the lights have been flipped on in the hallway. Her heart is a siren wailing deep inside her chest.

“Somebody must have let them in,” Ben says. He’s still holding her hands, their fingers twisting absently together, and it’s like they both realize it at the same time, letting go too fast.

“I bet it was that fucking freshman,” she says, clearing her throat and pushing her hair behind her ears. She’s already thinking about how she’s going to make her life a living hell come Monday. There are some benefits to being the queen bee.

“Rey—” Ben begins, but she holds both of their hands up. Suddenly she knows just what he’s going to say.

“Don’t,” she interrupts, and she’s surprised by how steady her voice sounds. She needs to remember him as not knowing, even if that’s not how he actually is. “I mean it. Whatever you’re about to say to me, I just . . . really want you to not say it.”

Ben looks at her. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Yeah. Of course.” He wipes his hands on his jeans and blows out the pumpkin candle, motions toward the door. On the other side of it she can hear people shouting like the goddamn end of the world. “You ready?” he asks.

She won’t even see him in school, she realizes. By the time he turns up again in January they’ll probably both have forgotten all about this. She swallows down a sour taste like panic in her mouth.  
“Yup,” she says, because there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s nothing to do about any of it but to keep going. “I’m ready.” Ben moves aside to let her past him, their shoulders barely brushing. She’s got her hand on the doorknob when he changes his mind. “Wait,” he says then, and, “Rey.” When she turns around to look at him, his eyes are dark and wide.

She rests her forehead against his chest for a moment, breathing. Ben holds very, very still. She can hear the sound of his heartbeat, steady, drowning out the sound of the mayhem raging on the other side of the door.


End file.
